Dish TV focuses on subscriber growth in FY25

Direct-to-home (DTH) operator Dish TV is bringing its attention back to growing its subscriber base after turning debt-free in FY24. In a conversation with FE on Monday, CEO Manoj Dobhal said subscriber growth was a key objective for the firm in FY25 to arrest market share erosion amid media consolidation and the emergence of over-the-top (OTT) platforms.

“In the first quarter of FY24, we paid off the last tranche of outstanding loans of `72.5 crore. We did that through internal accruals. Now that we are debt-free, we are fully focused on product and service innovations that can help us grow our subscriber base of around 15 million,” Dobhal said.

While board-level challenges between the promoter family (Goels) and the firm’s largest shareholder JC Flowers remain, Dobhal said the DTH operator will push Android set-top boxes, market its OTT aggregation service Watcho aggressively and launch Smart+ services where subscribers can enjoy popular OTT apps with their DTH subscription service. On Monday, Dish TV unveiled its Smart+ service to the media in Mumbai. Watcho, in particular, Dobhal said, has 3.6 million paid subscriptions and offers 17 OTT apps and over 200 linear TV channels.

Also, to prevent the migration of lower-end customers to DD Free Dish, which is the free DTH platform of Prasar Bharati, Dobhal said Dish TV had launched Zing Super set-top boxes recently, which come with a two-year validity and offer over 200 free-to-air (FTA) channels to consumers.

According to a report by global brokerage firm CLSA, the DTH market in India had 72.4 million subscribers in FY19. This has declined to 64.18 million as of September 2023, according to data sourced from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. DTH subscriber numbers for the December 2023 and March 2024 quarters are not out yet.

CLSA says that while the top two players, Tata Play (32.4% share) and Airtel DTH (27%), have increased their combined market share by 12 percentage points since FY19, Dish TV has lost share. The latter, which is the third-largest player with a market share of 21.5%, has seen an 18-percentage point decline since FY19.

Market share erosion has also come amid the long standing dispute between the Goels and JC Flowers, which acquired Yes Bank’s 24.19% stake in Dish TV in December 2022, over ownership and corporate governance standards. Jawahar Goel, the younger brother of Essel group chairman Subhash Chandra, has a 4.04% stake in the firm.

Since September 2021, when Yes Bank tried to reconstitute the Dish TV board, some 16 directors have been ousted, including Jawahar Goel, who was the chairman of the company. As things stand now, the Dish TV board has Dobhal and Ritu Kaura, an independent director, as its members, which is below the legally mandated limit of three directors.  Financial Express